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From: pjlahaie@zeus.achilles.net (Paul JY Lahaie)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX)
Date: 17 Apr 1996 20:40:38 -0400
Organization: A Red Hat Commercial Linux Site
Lines: 44
Message-ID: <4l4326$19d@zeus.achilles.net>
References: <4ki055$60l@Radon.Stanford.EDU> <31740061.389946B0@lambert.org> <4l19gb$sn8@zeus.achilles.net> <ALBERT.96Apr17172227@krakatoa.ccs.neu.edu>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:21787 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:696 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3328 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3172 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:17687 comp.os.linux.advocacy:46286
In article <ALBERT.96Apr17172227@krakatoa.ccs.neu.edu>,
Albert Cahalan <albert@krakatoa.ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>Wake up, people hate X. Part of "windows" is the boarder, icons,
>menus, whatever. X needs 16 MB of ram to do what both Windows
>and OS/2 can do in 8 MB. The curses library should send text
Have you actually run anything real in Win95 in 8MB of RAM?
It's quite pointless. If running means Solitaire, then yes, it runs
nicely.
>directly to the window system without all the xterm baggage.
You could write a curses lib that goes through Xlib. It's just that
no one has done it yet.
>The X window system is absurd. Think about what happens when
<code about the editor<-->ncurses<-->xterm<-->X snipped>
>hardware - we are no better than MS-DOS! What is _really_
>absurd is that the data goes through the kernel twice, yet in
>the end the X server just hits the hardware directly.
Let's look at what happens when I run an editor in a Win95 window.
The Windows kernel sets up a virtual 8086 machine, maps DOS into it,
and starts command.com. It then emulates a PC console and translates
the calls into appropriate Win API calls to do the drawing.
>Here is a picture of the problem.
>Existing: program---kernel---xterm---X---hardware
>Better: program---WindowSystem---kernel---hardware
Alternative: program--virtual machine--kernel--hardware
I'll take a little data passing over setting up a virtual machine
(that's doing address write protection to detect screen updates) to
display text windows anyday.
>just don't work. Would you like to have your kernel written
>in SmallTalk, or an ugly language like C? X and curses are
C
- Paul